When Google Owns You
Chris Brogan just posted a horror story that made me make backups of everything I've ever uploaded to Google Docs. Note to self: use Google Apps as a redundant backup only.
Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn't get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn't get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]
That's it.
Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:
Thank you for your report. We've completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we're unable to reveal any further information
about this account.And that's it.
That's not quite it... apparently Nick had paid for the corporate version of Google Apps, and therefore had access to technical support with a human being, who was able to resolve the problem. But the rest of us don't have that option.
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This is exactly the reason that I have not just a CD copy of my classes as a backup, but I also keep a full copy on my home PC, and a backup of that hard drive on the external... (obligatory Robin Williams: like in the dictionary; redundant - see redundant)
The only things I can't find copies of are the papers I wrote in high school - on my parent's Apple IIc in AppleWorks - because the disks are degraded (and all I really want from that is the physics paper I did on quantum chromodynamics as a science fair project).
I think there is irrational exhuberance behind the rush to online apps... this horror story is a sobering lesson. And free is never free.